Home › Creating Linked Data - Part IV: Developing RDF Schemas
Wed, 2009-12-30 10:47 — Dan Brickley (not verified)

Re: Creating Linked Data - Part IV: Developing RDF Schemas

This is a really great series, and in the RDFS world, lonnnng overdue :)

One tentative quibble, though it’s more of an aside:

  • “RDFS is designed for representing RDF schemas, but it has a few general-purpose properties that are good to know, namely rdfs:label (the label for a thing) and rdfs:comment (a comment or description about the thing).”

In the FOAF schema, we currently endorse this habit of using rdfs:label with instances, through declaring foaf:name to be rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:label. And it is certainly nice to know when a property is some kind of label. However this is one of the things that upsets OWL DL systems. And since the OWL 2.0 work has generally made OWL systems more tolerant of RDF/RDFS scruffyness, I wonder whether some steps from the ‘scruffy’ side towards convergence would be helpful. So I have been thinking about using a “LabelProperty” class for properties that label, instead of saying rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:label.

All this aside, rdfs:label could still be used on instances. But if we got rough consensus on a utility class for naming labelling properties, it could mean one less namespace (rdfs’s) cluttering up instance data. What do you think?

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